Repair of a Marantz

[cb123]

This thing had a lot of bloated body bag caps hissin' fit to bust, and two old, decrepit resistors in the left channel causing some thermal issues with its outputs -- like the kind if you ran it for about an hour you could use the output transistors as a cigarette lighter to fire up your Virginia Slims...like that kind of thermal issue. Which was kind of strange about the resistors, on account, when they were cool the olms were an acceptable 10.5, but when they started warming up a little they jumped to 15 olms which was off biasing the outputs and for solid state that's pretty critical. Well, I got that all done and replaced all the blown lights including the radio needle bulb, and now at even 50% this thing can raise your roof! That's still pretty strange though about the resistors, they normally just usually creep up in value not fluctuate.

 

[human]

That is one gorgeous piece of hardware! I salute your skill in bringing such a majestic beast back to its original glory. My grandfather had a Marantz similar to that, although I'm not sure if it was the same model. They just don't make audio equipment like that anymore and the pity is that in our digitized, bass-boosted, over-processed era, people just don't remember what real audio sounds like anymore. I have a couple of Kenwood receivers from that era but nothing on that scale. I reconstructed my college era system last winter and when I turned it on for the first time, it was a very emotional experience. I, too had forgotten the richness of '70s audio gear.

 

[cb123]

Thanks Edgar!

...And by the way you got that RIGHT!!! Such as that hot glue state, cheap Crosley Cruiser Crap and dime sized precision, China-mart made DC motors, or I-Phone mini micro mono speaker trash like that! Truly, we are at such a generation where they do not possess the slightest inkling of the vast richness of what Ultra High Fidelity has to offer. The 50s, 60s, and 70s had some really great stuff which was designed to be repaired, but the equipment, nowadays, (if you can even call it that) is designed to fail in quick order and be completely replaced with another piece of low fidelity trash which will EOL itself just as fast if not sooner! I was thinking about putting my '59 Magnavox on, which I most sadly found with a bad AC motor, but happily I found a replacement for it, and let me tell you, that thing can raise your house to the ground!

 

[dartman]

Finding good gear...

There are still some good gear out there. I bought a Onkyo 777 5.1 DTS receiver that ran well and had huge power reserves. It was 105 watts each to all 5 channels and about double that into 4 ohms for a sec. I ran it hard for 15 years and it sounded great just listening to fm, movies, cd's, or records. My rig before was a Sony strd 2070 that also sounded awesome, I did have one issue with it where the main board lost ground and the sound started breaking up. I couldn't figure it out and a good local stereo shop took it and said the ground connections get bad so they star washered all the screws holding the circuit boards in and that fixed it as it was a early all digital system internally and bad grounds disrupted the digital signal cuasing the distortion. My first real receiver was a Pioneer sx-650 with a whopping 35wpc. It was nice within its limits and still works today, just no lights.
I also had a few Realistic setups that were ok, as I worked at Radio Shack so always got deals on discontinued gear.
You have to do your research and avoid the cheapest crap. Main problem with music is the loudness wars have destroyed dynamic range and quality audio.
Try looking at vu meters on a DAT deck that can record native cd spec audio to a 4mm tape. Run a cd into its digital inputs and as soon as the audio comes up its reading 0db and never moves till the track fades out. Nobody uses these machines anymore but they used to be popular among early digital audio geeks and small recording studios.
I found one in excellent shape on eBay to add to my eclectic collection of audio and video recording gear. It makes true cd spec recordings live or through digital inputs and really sounds nice as long as you never exceed 0db on the levels, quite a bit different than recording to analog tape.
You can manually set tracks and everything, just like a cd.
My current reciever is another Onkyo 898, it supports 7.1 sound and is 110wpc all channels driven 20 to 20 so a bigger version of the 777 and still has a phono input too.